Karen's Anime Blog

We return to the dramatic notebook drop. Rintarou’s friends make the connection between Kaoruko’s name and the girl at the library, and Rintarou’s brain seems to pull a blue screen of death. Saku is particularly hostile, implying that Rintarou has been lying to them about her all this time. Eventually Rintarou squeezes out an “I don’t want to tell you,” and I continue to be impressed with how emotionally honest he is– well, to everyone but himself. He could have snapped “None of your business!” or something, but “I don’t want to tell you,” is both more accurate and more cutting.

The teacher gets on their case to stop arguing in the corner, so the issue is dropped for the time being. At home, Rintarou beats himself up for not checking the notebook more carefully, because he didn’t even know that Kaoruko’s tell-all Post-It note was there. Resigned, he realizes he should text Kaoruko the news that he passed the midterm and gets right on that. She’s delighted, but when she texts him back with a congratulations, he immediately thinks of Subaru’s warning about how getting involved with a Chidori boy could look bad for Kaoruko, and he puts his head down. Granted, I still don’t think this “scandal” would really amount to much of anything, but I can’t blame Rintarou for being cautious about her reputation.

The next day in school, Usami and Ayato are concerned: Saku and Rintarou still aren’t talking. Usami tries to cheer everybody up by suggesting some afterschool baseball practice to prepare for the sports festival, but nobody’s buying what he’s selling.

“Let’s play sports like manly men and sweat all our interpersonal problems away!”

Usami and Ayato catch up with Saku after school and find out what his problem is. He’s not mad at Rintarou for socializing with someone from Kikyo; he’s mad that Rintarou didn’t trust them enough to tell them about it. It’s not that he doesn’t have a point, but Saku kind of messed this up for himself by being so hostile to Rintarou in the classroom when the notebook was discovered. It was only natural for Rintarou to assume that his attitude was due to disapproval and shut him out.

This is hard for Saku because he feels like he owes Rintarou for helping him blend at Chidori; we don’t know exactly what happened (yet), but Rintarou clearly did something to help him fit in. Saku, who seems to be at ease with academics, does seem different from the other Chidori students and apparently there’s a story behind that, but we don’t get that story yet. The guys note that Rintarou is a pretty cool guy and they want to be there for him, so it looks like the drama bomb of yesterday was pretty easily diffused. Good, I really didn’t want to see Rintarou’s friends pull a stupid “How dare he mingle with the enemy!?” maneuver. Fortunately, they’re better than that.

At Plain, Rintarou is manning the counter with his mom, brooding. His mother thinks he’s bummed because he failed another test, but when he tells her he passed, she doesn’t believe him; worse, she thinks he might have cheated. I feel for Rintarou’s mom here; it’s not nice of her to think that her own son might have cheated, but if she’s used to him bringing home failing grades all the time, it’s hard not to think that way. Kaoruko comes in for some cake, and Rintarou adorably tries to hide behind the display case. Mom isn’t having that behavior for one second.

“Have you met my adorable idiot son? Free cake for life if you marry him and take him off my hands.”

Mom ducks out so Rintarou and Kaoruko can have some privacy, and Kaoruko insists they high-five for passing their midterms. Noticing that he seems out of sorts, she opines “When you’re feeling down, it’s good to eat a lot.” Kaoruko, darling, I have tried eating lots of stuff when I’m feeling down and I can promise you, it only makes me more down– not everyone has magical anime character metabolism. It’s adorable though, and Rintarou cracks up. After Kaoruko regains her composure, she gives him a look like he’s a shirtless hottie on the cover of a romance novel and takes her leave. Alone, Rintarou muses about what a nice person Kaoruko is. He takes out his phone and re-reads the texts she sent him again, and I just want to give him a big hug.

At the train station, Kaoruko is also looking at her texts from him when she gets a new text. Uh-oh, that can’t be good.

Above the cake shop, Rintarou and his mom sit down to dinner. As with most anime food, dinner looks amazing:

Fried Chicken! Excellent.

Rintarou and his mom have a fairly long conversation, and the main point of it is that Rintarou tends to give up on things, so his mom is happy that he chose to study for his exams and stuck with it; she’s more happy for that then the passing grades. She acts like she doesn’t know that Kaoruko is the reason he studied so hard, but I think she knows; she’s seen the two of them interact enough at this point that she gets it.

We change scenes to a park, and Subaru is sitting by herself. Kaoruko joins her, and we learn that this is the park where the two of them met, when Kaoruko saved Subaru from the bullies. Subaru has called Kaoruko here to tell her about her conversation with Rintarou at the coffee shop, but the episode ends before we can hear what she has to say. Is she going to tell the truth? Because if she says “I asked Rintarou to stay away from you and he said he wouldn’t, he likes you too much”, that’s likely only going to intensify Kaoruko’s crush on him, which Subaru doesn’t want. However, would she be enough of a garbage person to lie to Kaoruko about what he said to create bad blood and break them up? I hope not, but unfortunately, that would be the most dramatic twist so it’s definitely a possibility. Actually, if Subaru lied and tried to put bad words in Rintarou’s mouth, I think Kaoruko simply wouldn’t believe her.

This was kind of a slow episode featuring everyone coming to terms with the events of the season thus far, but we’ve got enough interaction between our two leads that it’s still compelling. I hope to see Rintarou reconcile with Saku, and for him to gird his loins to prepare for whatever nonsense Subaru has got cooked up.